How creating a cookbook inspired me to cook more, and to host meaningful dinner parties
Like many families around the world, cooking and eating have been long ingrained into the traditions of my own family. My family has been based in New York for a number of generations now, but through food we can retrace and share our lineage with our Eastern European roots, and family members of different generations across a number of countries and time periods who hosted holidays, dinner parties and gatherings in their homes long before us. Holidays were always a big deal in my home growing up, and we as a family cooked and prepared for holidays together, and always showcased for our guests an impressive array of food that blended old recipes passed down via handwritten notecards from generations to the next generation, as well as new recipes that were found in magazines, cookbooks, copied from restaurants, or shared by a friend or neighbor.
With a commitment to preserving the culinary traditions of my family (including our traditional classic meals to our new favorite traditions) I decided to build out a family cookbook, incorporating the favorite recipes of all my family members into one spiral bound book. There were two main purposes of creating the cookbook:
1. I wanted to have all of my recipes in one place so that me and my brothers could all easily access the recipes that we all loved (and so we didn’t have to call our mom every time we wanted to make brisket).
2. to create a written documentation of our family’s history, cognizant of the fact that we will all be the “relatives of the olden days” to some future generation. So often we are so focused on trying to decipher the past, that we forget where we stand in the fabric of the world- that one day a future generation will wonder about how we lived in these times, and I wanted to preserve this documentation.
What excites me most about food is how it can transport us into the kitchen of people who lived long before us. This past Rosh Hashanah, I hosted my family for dinner in my apartment for the first time. I cooked my Great-grandmother’s Honey Chicken, a recipe cooked annually by my mom, and now (for the first time) passed down to me to make. I made the recipe exactly as it was instructed, following the same exact steps as my family had prepared it for generations, and using more or less the same tools do do so. In that moment I felt this bond and connection to a world that led to my existence and shaped my lineage. There is something so meaningful about preparing a dish the exact same way as someone else. While I love experimenting in the kitchen, the following of someone’s cooking ritual can be powerful, and meaningful to your guests. Through building out this cookbook, and having all of my most cherished recipes in one place, I also feel optimistic that I can encourage those close to me to begin hosting others more often in their own homes, and sharing traditions of cooking and gathering with their networks.
Building out the family cookbook, was for me, a way to further realize these similarities that were shared between my family members present, and the ones who started the family traditional recipes way back when. As I transcribed the recipes into book format, I felt a need to create them all as well, to ensure I was able to follow the steps I was writing out with accuracy so that anyone who might come across the cookbook could make the same dishes with ease and confidence.
The thing I love most about tradition (especially very old traditions) is this idea that you are doing something that someone who lived way before you did was doing in the exact same way. I think in this modern age it’s humbling and important to recognize that while our technology may be more advanced now, our human make up is the same. The idea of gathering and hosting people in our homes around a table for a home-cooked meal really hasn’t changed much since ancient times, and I find it so special to be able to see hosting now as a homage to the ancient people who lived before us. Thinking about how to incorporate the nostalgia factor into my dinner parties, often through cooking meals that remind people of their own family traditions, has also helped me construct better and more meaningful dinner parties.
Ultimately, my journey to create a family cookbook was about more than just collecting and transcribing recipes—it was about preserving a family legacy, fostering connections across generations, and celebrating the enduring power of food to bring together. The month’s I spent documenting my family's culinary heritage, were such a rewarding way to reflect on my family’s history of cooking and entertaining in our homes, and the enduring importance of preserving it for generations to come, and I hope that I can inspire other people to do the same and preserve their family traditions to pass down as well.
